1. Field of the Invention
Provided herein are patient-specific surgical devices that provide a stable fitted position for use in shoulder surgery, fitting within a typical surgical incision. The patient-specific surgical devices may be used for various purposes including for use as or with a shoulder guide.
2. Description of the Related Technology
Conventional orthopedic prostheses, guides and implants have been in use for many years with considerable success. The use of custom designed prostheses, guides and implant components based on the patient-specific anatomy has moreover overcome many shortcomings of the older designs. Such patient-specific devices can be developed using commercially available software. Typically such devices are used for orthopedic interventions to the spine, hip, knee and/or radius. Patient-specific devices available on the market include patient-specific knee replacement prostheses, patient-specific femoral and tibia cutting blocks, distal radius drilling, cutting templates, etc. At present, there exists an increasing amount of surgical interventions that benefit from the use of these medical image based patient specific surgical devices as described in patent applications US 2005/0203528 A1 and EP 1486900 A1, for instance.
While patient-specific devices such as guides are now typically used to accurately place pins, guide bone cuts or insert implants during orthopedic procedures, the correct positioning of these patient-specific devices remains a critical factor with important impact on the outcome of the procedure.
During surgical procedures on the shoulder, patient-specific devices such as guides are often used to position and guide surgical instruments such as pins, wires and drills which can be used for instance for guiding the initial pin placement during shoulder replacements.
Prior art devices are typically positioned on a limited number of anatomical sites with low inter-person variation, allowing the device to be standardized making the same device design available for a large number of patients. However, standardized surgical instruments typically provide the user with a reduced accuracy, leading to small deviation from the operative planning resulting in more complex surgery, or unexpected problems occurring during the surgical procedure. Here the use of customized instruments based on the exact anatomy of the patient would provide a large number of benefits as the inter-persons variation is not an issue for patient-specific instruments. However, when providing patient-specific instruments, for instance for patient-specific devices such as guides used during shoulder surgery, it is often seen that these patient-specific devices provide only a limited patient-specificity wherein the device still needs to be positioned manually by the surgeon, with limited visual aids.
Accordingly, there remains a need for improved patient-specific devices for performing shoulder surgery.